News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

The agglomeration of proteins into structures called amyloid plaques is a common feature of many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's. Now, scientists reveal, through experiments and simulations, how resonance with an infrared laser, when it is tuned to a specific frequency, causes amyloid fibrils to disintegrate from the inside out. Their findings open doors to novel therapeutic possibilities for amyloid plaque-related neurodegenerative diseases that have thus far been incurable.

Osteoid osteomas are benign but painful bone-forming tumors usually involving long bones, with localization at the spine in 10-20% of the cases. In the last years, percutaneous radiofrequency ablation has been proposed as a new mini-invasive technique for the treatment of osteoid osteomas.

The objective of this study is to compare the clinical and radiographic outcomes between patients treated with static and expandable interbody spacers with adjustable lordosis for MIS LLIF.

To fight viruses, cells can deploy defence enzymes that progressively destroy viral genome. However, this degradation mechanism is not effective against epidemic viruses like Zika. In fact, the defence enzyme jams at precise points of the viral genome, which assumes a "defensive" conformation. This is how the virus succeeds at protecting important pieces of its RNA inside infected cells, as demonstrated by a recent study coordinated by SISSA and published in Nature Communications.

A key component of ambient direct air capture systems that remove carbon dioxide from the air is the sorbent material that is used to first capture the carbon and then to release it. In a new paper in Joule, researchers lay out exactly how some of these sorbent materials capture and release carbon, a finding that could lead to the smarter design of sorbent materials at the heart of all carbon removal systems.

When the SARS-CoV-2 virus penetrates human cells, it lets the human host cell produce proteins for it. One of these viral proteins, called PLpro, is essential for the replication and rapid spread of the virus. An international team of researchers led by Goethe University and University Hospital Frankfurt has now discovered that the pharmacological inhibition of this viral enzyme not only blocks virus replication but also strengthens the anti-viral immune response at the same time.

An Italian-American research conducted by researchers at the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Rovereto (Italy) and Harvard University in Boston (Usa) explains for the first time the mechanisms used by our brain to recognize specific smells. Thanks to this result, researchers will be able to think about the realization of an artificial sense of smell, to be transferred to robots and other intelligent machines in the future.

Evolutionary and developmental biologist Craig Albertson and colleagues at UMass Amherst report that they have identified a molecular mechanism that allows an organism to change the way it looks depending on the environment it is exposed to, a process known as phenotypic plasticity.